Join us Friday, April 29 at 10 am ET for a virtual seminar: Unpacking the Genocide of Hazaras in Afghanistan. Event co-hosted by CGM and the Porsesh Research and Studies Organization.
Seminar will feature insights from Dr. Farkhondeh Akbari (Monash University), Dr. Melissa Chiovenda (Zayed University), and Dr. Nazif Shahrani (University of Indiana, Bloomington) on the recent attacks on the Hazara population of Afghanistan.
Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Wzkq2NpWTA-cbWj6R8smTw
About our Panel:
Dr. Nazif Shahrani is an Afghan-American anthropologist specializing in political anthropology and anthropological approached to the study of religion with a focus on Islam. Specifically he is interested in institutional dynamics and political culture of Muslims, Islamist movements, problems of state-failure, role of nationalism in the social fragmentation of multi-ethnic nation-states, and the political economy of international assistance to postcolonial failing states and its consequences.
Dr. Farkhondeh Akbari is a postdoctoral fellow at the Gender, Peace and Security Centre at Monash University. Farkhondeh completed her PhD in diplomatic studies at the Australian National University. Dr. Akbari has work experience at the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and Afghanistan's Independent Directorate of Local Governance in Kabul. Farkhondeh is also an activist, using her research to advocate for human rights – especially the rights of women and girls, and vulnerable ethnic groups in Afghanistan.
Dr. Melissa Kerr Chiovenda is an assistant professor of anthropology at Zayed University, AbuDhabi. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork with Hazara civil society activists in Bamyan, Afghanistan from 2010-2013, with follow-up visits in 2016 and 2019. She focuses on the transmission of collective and cultural trauma through the activists' activities, and how this affects political identity and subjectivity. She has currently been conducting ethnographic fieldwork with Afghan refugees in Athens, Greece, each summer since 2016 focusing on political and transnational placemaking. She has published extensive articles and chapters on these topics, and has a completed book manuscript she is proposing to publishers.